Voices from the Farm: Digging Deep in the Vermilion Watershed

In an industrialized agricultural landscape dominated by big business, the ideals of organic, sustainable farming are harder to achieve than most urban environmentalists realize. Charlie Corwin humanizes this struggle with a reading of stories from the perspective of farmers in the Vermilion River watershed of Illinois, shedding light on the challenges they face in adapting to conservation agriculture. The stories are based on conversations with Vermilion watershed area farmers from fieldwork conducted in Summer 2018 and Corwin’s doctoral research.

Artist Stella Brown leads a gallery discussion of her work Vermilion River Watershed Geologic Column followed by an all-ages workshop. Participants create artistic representations of natural and made-made geologic layers using materials collected during research in the Vermillion watershed.